Denali Montessori Kindergarten teacher Katrina Mulholland demonstrated to students in early May how to make the sound for the letter “Z.”
“Put your tongue right behind the top of your teeth, your front teeth, and you’re going to turn your voice on,” Mulholland told her class.
“I lost a tooth, though,” one student said.
“It’s harder to make those sounds when you’re missing teeth!” Mulholland replied.
The reading lesson is all about separating the letter sounds that make up a word, and it comes from the University of Florida Literacy Institute’s Foundations reading curriculum, often referred to as “UFLI.” Last spring, Denali Montessori was one of 25 schools across the Anchorage School District that piloted UFLI for elementary readers. Now after a full year of results, teachers and administrators said the curriculum is having a major impact.
“This is the first year we’ve used UFLI from the very beginning of the year to the very end of the year, and we can actually see student outcomes,” kindergarten teacher Kjerstin Thomas said. “We have seen a major increase in our proficient readers.”
But Anchorage educators said implementing the curriculum has not been without challenges.
No funding, more work
The new curriculum stems from the Alaska Reads Act, which passed in 2022 with the goal of getting every student proficient at reading by third grade. It aimed to do so by requiring Alaska schools to test their students’ reading ability three times a year. Schools must then provide small-group interventions for students who are not proficient for their grade level, measured by a target score on the DIBELS literacy screener.
In Anchorage, interventions happen during a 30-minute block at the start of school called “What I Need,” or “WIN,” time. Along with over a dozen districts, the Anchorage School District adopted the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum for small-group interventions before the 2022-2023 school year, but added UFLI last spring.
According to district data, about half of Denali Montessori kindergarteners scored well above the benchmark on the literacy screener this spring, compared to just 36% before UFLI was adopted. District-wide, about 11% more kindergarteners scored above the benchmark in 2025 than in 2023.
It’s a significant jump in a state where children have long performed poorly on standardized reading tests — a datapoint that lawmakers, including Gov. Mike Dunleavy, often highlight during school funding debates.
But for Thomas, the success is about more than numbers — it’s watching her students learn.
“When it really comes down to it, we can look at data all day, but what I see is kids are psyched to actually be readers,” Thomas said.
But there’s a big problem, Thomas and other district educators said: a lot of extra work and no funding to support it.
While Dunleavy championed the Reads Act, he also vetoed the roughly $5.2 million last year meant to support its implementation in schools.
Thomas said teachers need more resources for all of the extra responsibilities.
“I am happy to reach out to families to let them know their kids are making progress or not making progress, but it's a lot of extra on the teachers with no plan or funding, and it's very concerning to me,” she said.
A key component: small groups
UFLI is very similar to other phonics-based reading lessons, but gets more specific. Students are taught the relationship between speech sounds, called "phonemes," and the letter combinations used to make those sounds in writing, called "graphemes." Lesson plans are far more interactive than previous curriculums that often involved teachers reading to a class of idle students, Thomas said.
“There is a ton of student interaction. So, students have a whiteboard. They are writing the letters, they are moving magnet letters,” Thomas said. “They’re on, they're not just listening. It's very engaging.”
In the last dozen years, 40 states have passed laws that require schools to use curriculum based on “the science of reading,” like UFLI.
Denali Montessori Principal Deanna Beck said the lessons are most effective in small groups.
The Legislature recently boosted state funding significantly for schools for the first time in about a decade, but class sizes have already increased after years of flat funding.
“Having more money available to us, just in general, is a positive thing, because we know when we do the smaller groups, give that really targeted intervention to students when they’re struggling for whatever reason, we can get them what they need,” Beck said.
One of the reasons Denali has been so successful teaching the new curriculum is the buy-in from staff, Beck said.
Beck is trained to teach UFLI, as well as the school’s gym teacher, so students don’t miss out on lessons when teachers need a substitute.
“The confidence of students who are reading and spelling has just skyrocketed,” Beck said.
In an email, district spokesperson MJ Thim said many schools are showing growth similar to Denali after incorporating UFLI. But, he said additional funding is needed for all of the elements that make UFLI work, like summer programs for struggling readers, communicating with parents outside of school hours and planning and providing reading interventions for students.
“For this to be done well with a focus on what is best for students," Thim wrote, "it needs to be funded."
